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We could be at the end of the road for the Danish method of democracy. Our style of parliamentary politics has been celebrated and admired internationally for many years, but last week’s general election has left it in crisis. The result was a vote of no confidence in a centrist government led by the Social Democrat Mette Frederiksen. Her administration was, in the Danish context, an unusual political construction. Frederiksen had broken the old pattern of politics in 2022 by forming a governing alliance between the centre-left and centre-right.
Yet the most likely outcome of the election is that Denmark will get another centrist government. This is a kind of democratic boomerang. For reasons of perverse parliamentary logic, what the voters reject, they get right back in the face.
The paradox could be called the tyranny of the 10%: if 45% of voters in a multiparty system want a government to the left and 45% want a government to the right but 10% vote for parties that want to govern from the centre, it will be very difficult for the old blocs to form governments. This is a new situation in Denmark that will make negotiations to form a new government very challenging.
With only one brief and failed exception in the late 1970s, Danish governments have over the past half a century been based either on the left or the right. The historical ideological conflict between their interests has been the organising principle of Danish parliamentary politics and it has produced a remarkable combination of legitimacy and efficiency.
We never operated an institutionalised “firewall” as in Germany or a consensual “cordon sanitaire” as in France. The conviction widely shared in Danish politics is that you deal with the forces that in other democracies would be shunned as populists by offering them a seat at the table. It is deradicalisation through integration and recognition of democracy as a collective process where governing parties could and should learn from parties protesting from the margins.
The positive result of this political culture is that those in power could not ignore protests against the governing consensus. Dissatisfaction with the system was thus able to correct and influence the system. And if you look at Frederiksen’s political profile, her immigration policies have definitely been shaped by protest parties on the right while her environmental policies have definitely been shaped by demands from parties of the left.
The Social Democrats once considered it racist, for example, to limit the number of migrants coming to the country, as the far right demanded. And they considered it utopian when the left parties demanded a 70% reduction of emissions as the national target for 2030. Both positions have now been embraced by the Social Democrats.
But the negative effect is a culture of blackmail from the right that has shaped the entire political horizon in Denmark. For many years the ritual transaction of voting through the annual budget has fallen hostage to concessions to the Danish People’s party which, year after year, comes up with spectacular new demands to make life more miserable for immigrants and refugees.
The strategy of deradicalising the extremes by inviting them to the table has led to extremism of the centre, a radicalisation of the governing parties and especially of Danish social democracy. This has produced a contradiction in their attitudes towards international law and the liberal order. When it comes to defending Greenland against the US and Ukraine against Russia they appeal to international law but not when it comes to punishing and repatriating immigrants and refugees.
This parliamentary trade-off became untenable for the then prime minister and leader of the Liberal party, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who announced his “moment of liberation” and in 2021 formed a new centrist party, the Moderates. The platform for building governments of the right thus collapsed. But not on the left. From 2019 to 2022 the Social Democrats formed a minority government with the support of the left and centre-left. The Danish recipe for social democracy in the 21st century secured the support of between 25% and 30% of the voters: somewhat leftist on the economy, green on climate and environment, and far right on immigration.
But after a Covid mishandling scandal, Frederiksen was forced to resign in 2022. A united right demanded her impeachment and even though the subsequent election produced a narrow majority for the left, she opted to form a centrist government with the old Liberal party and the Moderates.
Officially the governing parties claimed that the era demanded a leadership of responsibility and experience. But this was an unconvincing cliche. What they were doing was populism for the elites that substituted the legitimate ideological conflict between left and right with an imagined picture of reasonable grownups in the centre and the ridiculous children on the extremes. It was a radical break in the Danish parliamentary political tradition and it never managed to deliver, even on its own terms.
Voters never appreciated the alliance between the old political rivals, the Social Democrats (the traditional governing party on the left) and the Liberal party (the traditional governing party from the right). Last week, the Social Democrats had their worst election in more than 100 years. The elite populism of the centre thus has ended up weakening the parties of power and empowering the parties of protest.
It was revealing, moreover, that the two traditional governing parties campaigned on their historical right and left positions as soon the early election was called this year. The Social Democrats demanded a wealth tax and protection of the environment, the Liberal party campaigned on the promise of a “richer” Denmark.
They knew they could not convince voters to support their policies by appealing to the elite populism of the centre ground so they returned to the conflict between right and left to win public support.
Faced with this gap between electoral promises and the reality of governing, it seems we need to reinvent politics and create new channels of influence between protest and power. In Denmark the fear now is that we will be haunted by that familiar European ghost: a centrism of the governing classes that produces political alienation and public frustration but manages to eliminate all alternatives.
There’s now a very real danger that if centrism breeds yet more centrism, any pushback against injustice and indignity will degenerate into destructive forces. The boomerang could end up undermining the Danish style of democracy.
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